le cases it is probable that poverty had something to do with
deciding a vocation so premature. But there were other inducements,
which rendered the monastic life not unattractive, to a young man
seeking knowledge at a period and in a district where instruction was
both costly and difficult to obtain. Campanella himself informs us that
he was drawn to the order of S. Dominic by its reputation for learning
and by the great names of S. Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. Bruno
possibly felt a similar attraction; for there is nothing in the temper
of his mind to make us believe that he inclined seriously to the
religious life of the cloister.

During his novitiate he came into conflict with the superiors of his
convent for the first time. It was proved against him that he had given
away certain images of saints, keeping only the crucifix; also that he
had told a comrade to lay aside a rhymed version of the Seven Joys of
Mary, and to read the lives of the Fathers of the Church instead. On
these two evidences of insufficient piety, an accusation was prepared
against him which might have led to serious results. But the master of
the novices preferred to destroy the document, retaining only a
memorandum of the fact for future use in case of need.[84] Bruno, after
this event, obeyed the cloistral discipline in quiet, and received
priest's orders in 1572.

At this epoch of his life, when he had attained his twenty-fourth year,
he visited several Dominican convents of the Neapolitan province, and
entered with the want of prudence which was habitual to him into
disputations on theology. Some remarks he let fall on transubstantiation
and the Divinity of Christ, exposed him to a suspicion of Arianism, a
heresy at that time rife in southern Italy. Bruno afterwards confessed
that from an early age he had entertained speculative doubts upon the
metaphysics of the Trinity, though he was always prepared to accept that
dogma in faith as a good Catholic. The Inquisition took the matter up in
earnest, and began to institute proceedings of so grave a nature that
the young priest felt himself in danger. He escaped in his monk's dress,
and traveled to Rome, where he obtained admittance for a short while to
the convent of the Minerva.

[Footnote 84: The final case drawn up against Bruno as heresiarch makes
it appear that his record included even these boyish errors. See the
letter of Gaspar Schopp in Berti.]

We know very little what had be